Monday, 8 December 2014

XSS Flaw on Old NY Times Article Pages - Almost All Pages Are Affected

URLs to articles in New York Times (NYT) published before 2013 have been found to be vulnerable to an XSS (cross-site scripting) attack capable of delivering code to be executed in the context of the web browser.

Based on The New York TImes’ Design, Almost all URLs before 2013 are affected (All pages of articles). In fact, all article pages that contain “PRINT” button, “SINGLE PAGE” button, “Page *” button, “NEXT PAGE” button are affected.

The New York Times changed this mechanism since 2013. It decodes the URLs sent to its server. This makes the mechanism much safer now

The Vulnerability was found by a mathematics PhD student Wang Jing from School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences(SPMS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.